log in | register | forums
Show:
Go:
Welcome
The Icon Bar is the longest running RISC OS portal. The sensibilities that Acorn instilled in us still influence our interests and writing.

Buy swag
Got news?
Let us know!
The Video Games Guide
The Video Games Guide
Does this retrospective respect Acorn games?
Subscriptions RSS Feeds
RSS 2.0 | 1.0 | 0.9
Atom 0.3
Misc RDF | CDF
 
View on Mastodon
@www.iconbar.com@rss-parrot.net
Podcasts
Subscribe | iTunes | List
Latest MP3
Site Search
 
Article archives

Heretic update from R-Comp

Posted by Mark Stephens on 11:11, 21/4/2024 |
 

R-CompInfo have now released an update of the Heretic game.
 

Continue reading "Heretic update from R-Comp" | Comment in the forums

Amcog Games 3D Turbo boost reviewed

Posted by Mark Stephens on 07:12, 25/4/2023 | ,
 
One of the (many) reasons to attend the RISC OS shows is to get to play the games on the Amcog stand and see them demoed by their author (who will usually give you some useful tips). Amcog have been creating quite a library of Computer games for RISC OS machines and the latest is a racing game.
 
Continue reading "Amcog Games 3D Turbo boost reviewed" | 2 comments in the forums

Free Tap Plane game released for RISC OS

Posted by Mark Stephens on 06:52, 14/3/2023 |
 
We have had a lot of fun playing Jeron's previous games, so really excited to report that he has been busy!
 
Continue reading "Free Tap Plane game released for RISC OS" | Comment in the forums

Mamie Fletcher’s House released

Posted by Mark Stephens on 08:20, 7/12/2021 |
 
There seems to be quite be quite a renaissance of games on RISC OS at the moment. Although Rick Murray did not have a stand, his new game was being demonstrated on several stands.
 
Continue reading "Mamie Fletcher’s House released" | Comment in the forums

Free Substitute Soccer game available on !Store

Posted by Mark Stephens on 17:25, 29/11/2021 |
 
Jeroen Vermeulen has been busy continuing with his project to convert Python games in Python from the book "Code the Classics" by the Raspberry Pi organisation. His fifth game (Substitute Soccer) is now available as a free download from !Store
 
Continue reading "Free Substitute Soccer game available on !Store" | Comment in the forums

Software Preservation at the ROUGOL Show

Posted by Andrew Poole on 16:30, 28/10/2021 | , , ,
 
Disc image of Pandora's BoxWe've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.
 
Comment in the forums

Arculator updated to add A4 emulation and more podule support

Posted by Andrew Poole on 11:33, 10/9/2021 | , , , , , ,
 
Archimedes emulator Arculator has been updated to version 2.1 with some very nice new features. The emulator can now emulate an A4 laptop or the A500 prototype and can also emulate more podules, including the Aleph One 386 and 486 podule, meaning you can now run DOS and Windows in the emulator.
 
Other podules now supported include Acorn ROM podules, MIDI podules, Oak SCSI interfaces and Computer Concepts' ColourCard. Support for disc images in the .hfe format is also now included.
 
Arculator running Windows  Arculator being an A4

 
Head over to the Arculator website to download the new version.
 
5 comments in the forums

How data can be recovered from damaged discs using an oscilloscope

Posted by Andrew Poole on 08:30, 18/5/2021 | , ,
 
Reading data from a floppy disc - the hard wayA couple of months ago, we told you about the Acorn Preservation Team, who are working to preserve the data from old discs before the data's gone forever.
 
Chris Evans and Phil Pemberton have written an in-depth look at how they were able to recover the data from some damaged discs that were otherwise unreadable using more traditional methods.
 
The post is an interesting look at how even when it appears the disc may be unrecoverable, with the right tools there can still be hope of recovering the data using more analogue methods at the magnetic flux level (and sometimes drawing peaks on a waveform manually!).
 
Also, as we noted in the previous article, the Acorn Preservation Team are still looking to help preserve any unique, rare, interesting and potentially historic discs anyone may have tucked away in the back of their cupboards before it's too late. They're not only working on BBC Micro discs, but discs for other formats and systems, too.
 
Links:
Recovering "lost" treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope - Chris Evans' blog
 
Comment in the forums

Acorn Preservation Team want to help archive your old data before it's too late

Read article... | Comment in the forums

Book: Acorn - A World in Pixels

Read article... | 2 comments in the forums

Cloverleaf drops promise of including retro games with Kickstarter rewards (Updated)

Read article... | Comment in the forums

Amcog's latest game Star Mine reviewed

Read article... | Comment in the forums

Amcog Games Escape from the Arcade reviewed

Read article... | 1 comment in the forums

RISC OS interview with Tim H-Smith

Read article... | 1 comment in the forums
Recent discussions
- APDL make their PD catalogue available for free download (News:73)
- WROCC October 2024 talk on wednesday - RISCOSbits (News:)
- September 2024 News Summary (News:2)
- London Show is 4 weeks away (News:)
- ROOL updates DDE to issue 31e (News:4)
- WROCC Newsletter Volume 41:12 reviewed (News:)
- WROCC September 2024 talk on wednesday - Amcog (News:2)
- Rougol September 2024 meeting on monday (News:)
- September developer 'fireside' chat is on saturday night (News:)
- CloudFS re-evaluated with new 0.35 release (News:3)
Services
- Free ads
- Web hosting
Sites we like
- Ganymede & Titan
- Ars Technica
- pagetable.com
- Kotaku
- Daring Fireball